


the inner mechanism of a black box

by Bee_4



Series: system theory [1]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Gen, Imprisonment, Pandora's Vault, Self-Harm, Starvation, Technoblade Angst (Video Blogging RPF), Technoblade Whump (Video Blogging RPF), Technoblade-centric (Video Blogging RPF), no beta we die like ranboo every time technoblade streams, sam's prison is ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING FOLKS, technoblade's chat is canon, the one where technoblade is thrown in pandora's vault and has a REAL BAD TIME
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28373880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bee_4/pseuds/Bee_4
Summary: Technoblade lets himself get imprisoned for Philza’s sake. He doesn’t plan on being there long. Unfortunately, he’s underestimated Pandora’s Vault.There are things that will make even the Blade fall apart in due time, as it turns out.
Series: system theory [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2078031
Comments: 98
Kudos: 1395





	the inner mechanism of a black box

**black box** : In system theory, a black box is a system that can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs, but for which the mechanisms it determines its outputs is unknown, irrelevant, or unknowable. That is to say: a black box does something you can observe the result of, but you can’t observe  _ how it does it _ . The inside of the box is hidden to everything but what’s in it—and even the output probably can’t tell you exactly how it got from where it was before it was put in the black box to where it is after. all it can say is it’s changed.

* * *

He doesn’t even have his communicator.

Honestly, Technoblade thinks that’s nothing less than  _ petty. _ He’s already trapped in a relatively small obsidian box, no obvious escape routes available. He’s already been marched through about three nether portals, stripped of all of his items, spawn-trapped, and isolated with redstone and a spawn he’d been forced to set in a position that he couldn’t escape from. He’d been armorless, weaponless, slowed, weakened, poisoned for good measure, hands tied behind his back. 

The green bastard was wearing a mask, but Technoblade could hear the smile as he untied Technoblade’s arms, took his communicator, and said: “You can think of us as even now!” He’d left and the pistons had fired, the stone closing definitively with a  _ clank _ well before Technoblade could even attempt to listen to the voices’ recommandation to either “JFK” or “o7” or mostly just “BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD”. Thousands of voices, howling, and…

All he can think is that stealing his communicator is petty. It isn’t like there’s anyone other than Phil he’d bother to try to give his location. It isn’t like he knows enough about redstone to give Phil a way to break him out without risking Phil getting hurt. It isn’t like he hasn’t been told exactly what will happen to Phil if he tries anything so  _ obvious _ .

It’s not like he hadn’t fought back because of exactly that.

So this? This is just an overly petty attempt to keep him isolated. Unfortunately for Dream, Techno has gone  _ days _ without speaking to people before  _ entirely on accident, _ let alone when he’s been isolated on  _ purpose _ . If Dream’s attempting to break him by leaving him alone, he’s chosen the wrong victim. Technoblade: always  _ five steps ahead.  _ He’d prepared himself for total solitary confinement by being a loser without friends. Foolproof!

He’s Technoblade, and he’s the best at what he does for a reason! Take that! As soon as the poison wears off, he’s already planning to escape. Philza only needed a few days, after all, just needed long enough that Dream would relax the guillotine over his head and he’d escape. All Technoblade was doing still sitting here was buying time.

It shouldn’t be long at all.

* * *

It’s hard to tell time without windows or a clock. That being said, most poison effects wear off after about half a day, so it’s probably been that much time or maybe a bit less than that. The burns on his wrists from the rope have healed oddly, letting Techno know that there’s a regeneration beacon nearby. Interesting, but not surprising. With that around, he’s not going to find a way to kill himself and respawn outside of the prison, even if he’d managed to break the spawn trap. Not that he’d try something like that anyway; Technoblade never dies. Still, goes to show this thing is thorough.

His limbs are heavy in a strange way. It’s not slowness or weakness. It takes him some time to realize it’s  _ mining fatigue _ , because it’s not just his limbs being heavy so much as something deep in his muscles that  _ aches _ when he tries to move too much. It’s persistent. Had they captured an Elder Guardian and shoved it beneath the prison or something? If so, that was impressive; wrangling something like that while feeling like  _ this _ couldn’t be an easy process.

He should stop feeling impressed, he thinks, as he paces the cell (it is three blocks by three blocks, square, made of obsidian, lit up by a single glowing redstone lamp, and totally empty). They’d even thought through the fact that, had Techno not felt like his limbs were rotting from the inside, he’d been known to break down walls before. Layered obsidian walls, maybe not, but… He’ll still put that aside as a possibility. He could probably manage it eventually, even with the Elder Guardian’s exhaustion eating away at him.

He can’t hear anything else nearby, but he’d be surprised if there weren’t observers lining the walls outside of the cell, ready to set off some complicated redstone the moment he broke out of his cage. It really was impressive, and  _ flattering _ . All of this, just for him? All of these precautions for one pig?

It was built by that one guy, right? The one who’d stolen Carl. Sam. Maybe since he keeps on feeling impressed he should tell Sam about it after he gets out.

(Too bad he wouldn’t have been able to trick them into arresting Skeppy instead of him. Skeppy’s response would have been hilarious.)

The easiest way out, he figures, is wait for someone to come and feed him or give him water and jump them. He’ll look for other ways, of course. Mining fatigue makes jumping anyone wearing any kind of armor difficult, and he’d already experienced the multiple splash potions they seemed to have on hand solely for incapacitating him. Even with all of that considered, it would be the absolute easiest way to escape.

It had the downside of having no security against Phil getting hurt, but he’d always known all he could do was buy time.

To be honest, he still has no plan for that beyond “wait for a few days before escaping, which is enough time for Phil to have prepared and gotten himself out of danger, given that the last thing Techno had done with his communicator was give him enough warning while also requesting Phil not try any stupid rescue missions because Techno could handle himself”. It’s not exactly foolproof, but Phil can take care of himself well enough that Techno can assume Phil will be prepared by the time Techno escapes.

The voices in his head, at some point during his pacing and waiting for the potion effects they’d used to incapacitate him to wear off, had gotten bored (or maybe just realized there was no easy avenue for Technoblade to murder Dream through at the moment) and gone back to just saying ‘E’, which meant they probably don’t have any useful information. Still...

“Chat, I need a better plan than waiting,” he says.

_ L _

_ LOL _

_ L _

_ E  _

_ lame _

_ L  _

_ lol  _

_ technolame _

Yeah, that’s about what he thought he’d get.

“Chat, it’s not my fault it isn’t excitin’ to watch me pace around an obsidian box! Don’t blame me! Blame Dream!” It’s sort of his fault. He always could have fought back. He can tell the voices are thinking that, too. But the thing is: he couldn’t have fought back, not with what was hanging over his head. “You’ll be excited by a prison break,” he says, trying to appease them. “Prison breaks are excitin’, right?” Maybe he won’t even break out the first time they feed him. They have to eventually let him stretch his legs too, eventually. He can practically reach from one side of the room he’s in to the other, it’s so small. It’s like he’s been shoved in someone’s closet. Leaving a piglin of his size in a place like this was practically torture. He barely has enough room to lie down, let alone to do… anything.

He runs his hands along the walls. The good news is that they’re so solid that no one can see in. Obviously looking for weak points would be suspicious if they’d built windows to observe him through into the cell. Hah. Point for Technoblade. His knees ache. Mining fatigue is just gonna have to be something he gets used to over the next few days. (He refuses to believe it’ll be more than a few days. He has pride!)

There are no weak points. 

Even the entrance, which had originally been stone and made with pistons, has been filled in with glassy obsidian. There has to be seams somewhere, Techno thinks, somewhere his fingers can get enough purchase that he could crack the obsidian. That was, after all, the secret to mining the stuff—finding the small imperfections in how it had hardened and cracking it carefully along those seams. True, he normally had a pickaxe for that, but he’d broken walls with his hands before.

His bones creak. The voices continue to make fun of how dull everything is before going back to shouting ‘E’ at him again—wait, no, it’s ‘/rainbowchat’ this time, whatever that means. Thanks, Chat. Very helpful. 

He runs his hands along the walls again, rapping his knuckles across it and listening to the echo, and still, there’s nothing. Well, someone’s going to feed him eventually. He’ll just come up with plans on how to take them out while all of his muscles ache, he has no weapons, he’s presumably splash potioned into oblivion, and the other guy’s wearing heavy armor. 

He’s faced worse odds.

* * *

Scratch that. He’s been staring at the same walls for hours upon hours now, and he no longer has poison slowly fading or testing his limbs for whether slowness has worn off yet to distract him. There’s nothing to do. There’s nothing to  _ do. _ Breathe in, breathe out. He runs his hands along the walls again.

He’s never been able to be still well.

“You all were right, Chat! This is lame,” he says. There’s only but so many times he can check on the walls and the utterly, utterly silent place he’s been put before he goes a little feral. He needs something to do. He scans his mind for something to occupy himself until tomorrow, when he can start learning the guard schedule as well as he can without any way to tell time.

“Impromptu Greek Mythology time.” he says. He tells himself the story of Theseus. Chat responds positively. He tells them about the Minotaur again, trying to tell the story from the bull man’s point of view instead of Theseus’s for once (it was never the bull’s fault for being born). He talks until his throat hurts a bit too much for him to keep on talking, because it’s something to do, and he’s really, really bad at doing nothing. 

At least there are the voices in his head to laugh at his jokes as he starts retelling and retelling the same stories.

The redstone lamp flickers, but never turns off, leaving the room that artificial, uncomfortable yellow, somehow not quite bright enough to light a room made of pitch-black walls but too bright for the room to feel dark. Eventually, somewhat against his will, he falls asleep, because there’s nothing else for him to do, and there’s only but so many times his brain can anxiously rotate battle plans before he gets too bored to stay awake. He expects to be woken up by whoever’s coming to feed him in the morning. 

* * *

He wakes up to the same redstone lamp, a strange heaviness in his limbs that he realizes is the mining fatigue eating at his muscles even while he’d slept, stopping any of the soreness from healing overnight. He wakes up to the cell looking exactly the same as when he fell asleep and no one at all.

_ technolate! _

_ late _

_ awwww _

_ technolate _

_ technosleep _

_ technolate _

“Late? How can I possibly be late, Chat. No one’s even come by yet. I’m not late. Getting some sleep to occupy time is not being late.” And then there’s a howl in his head and Techno frowns because he’d been dragged into the prison in the evening, and talked mythology late into the night, and now Chat’s saying something about it being morning, morning, 6 AM. “Clearly, I’m not the one who’s late,” he says. “I didn’t even know the time! If I don’t know the time, how can I be late? You’re going to have to tell me time if you want me to be late, Chat, that’s just how this is gonna have to work.”

The voices are still yelling at him for being late, but a few of the louder voices, the ones that somehow reach above the din, tell him the time again. He slept somewhere between three and two hours, by his estimate. Not long, but at least a bit. He doesn’t feel rested at all. He feels more tired. But some sleep, generally, does turn out better than none, especially when he’s going to have to memorize a guard schedule today.

He starts stretching. It probably won’t help when the aches he’s feeling are mining fatigue, and not actual muscle soreness, but he’d spent too long fighting to ignore the importance of stretching out. Plus, it’s another thing to do, and he’ll need to come up with plenty of things to do if he’s going to be here a few days. He’d failed to take his ADHD into account when he’d gotten captured to get Phil to safety. Easy? When there was nothing to stimulate his rotating mind?

He stretches, losing himself in a long routine. He needs to stretch… basically everything, to have any hope of staving off the soreness, and it’s relaxing, just moving. Something physical while he waits. If he really focusses, he can spend an hour on this, at least.

He does stretches. He does basic daily warm-ups (the ones he never stopped doing, even in retirement, because there was no reason not to stay fit). He has to adapt them some, given that he’s in a box that he can’t move further than a few feet in, but he gets some done. He realizes in the process that the regen from the beacon is supplemented by  _ jump boost _ , of all things, because beacons can’t be purely regen, and sort of wants to laugh. He can easily touch the ceiling with a leap like this. He also can barely think of a use for this when he breaks out, given that everyone else will have the jump boost as well, but hey, it’s something to work with.

He does more stretches. His chest starts to burn in a funny way. He realizes he doesn’t have water. He hadn’t realized; the obsidian was keeping everything the pleasant kind of cool you don’t notice as a temperature at all, and it was stopping him from remembering that if he’s going to do anything active, he should probably wait until he has water.

Something in his head says:  _ it’s odd, isn’t it, that they didn’t give me water, right? _

He goes back to knocking on the walls methodically. He lets that swallow his brain for a while, too, trying to map is there’s anywhere the obsidian is weak. All he gets is that the obsidian is thick, thicker than any obsidian he’d done this to before. Normally when he collects obsidian, it’s in one-block thick layers, maybe two-block thick on occasion. There’s almost no circumstance anyone would make thicker obsidian. Even the walls Dream had built around L’Manburg would have rang like a bell when knocked on. Obsidian was a nearly unbreakable glass, so you only ever needed thin layers, really.

Techno can’t hear ringing as he knocks on the walls.

If he hits them hard enough, they have to, he thinks, but the level he’d need to hit them would have to be… very loud. If there are as many guards as they were when Techno was first marched into the prison, then they’d definitely notice he’s up to something. It’s the easiest way to find the places where the obsidian is weakest, but he can just assume for now that it’s weakest at the seams, at the corners in the glassy obsidian where it connected, if only because that was where the otherwise solid obsidian bent.

He knocks on the corners and hears no ringing there, either. He gives up on it for the time being. He paces a tight circle around the cell, over and over again.

“Chat, what time is it?”

It’s past noon. Probably. Half of Chat had tried to tell him it was any other time between about 10 am and midnight, but most of Chat seems to have answered noon the first time, so that’s  _ probably _ the real time. He hadn’t noticed. No one’s come by yet.

He has to find more ways to entertain himself. Great.

“I know I have a shorter attention span than most people,” he says, “but even zoo animals are at least given  _ something _ . I couldn’t use a deck of cards to escape-”

_ lol _

_ stab with the cards _

_ newb _

_ get gud _

_ f _

_ can’t even use a deck of cards to break out of jail _

_ bad _

“- Chat, you’re not helpin’ my case.”

He probably could, if left alone long enough, at least figure out how to make a deck of cards dangerous. Chat’s not wrong. That wasn’t his point. He’s not sure why he came up with that first, though. He’s terrible at solitaire.

He’s just going to go over his plans, over and over again. Someone has to come by eventually; they have to feed him or at least give him the water they didn’t when they’d sealed him in. 

(...he has a sinking feeling as he remembers that pistons can’t move obsidian, and he couldn’t find a seam.)

By the time he falls asleep later that night—he’s gone over what plans he can make from the position he’s in so many times that he’s pretty sure both he and the voices are going insane—he still knows nothing about the guard schedule, and no one’s come by.

* * *

When he wakes up, the voices are yelling at him for being late again. He’d appreciate if they didn’t do that, especially since at first it scared him into thinking a guard had come by and he’d missed it. He hadn’t. No one’s been here. His throat feels raw, and his muscles are still sore.

He stretches.

Great. He’s already making a routine. On the one hand, he can’t help it. He literally lists out his goals every morning, or goes over the goals he’s already written out. He tries to be unpredictable, but alas, even the blood god has habits.

He does slow exercises with the stretches this time, because he still doesn’t have any water, and he doesn’t want to pass out. 

There’s a tenseness. No one’s been here. He still doesn’t have water. If he pays attention, he can feel the strange, numbing sensation of the regeneration beacon along his throat. His head aches, both above his eyes and along the lines where the totem had brought him back to life. He’s from the nether, partially, he thinks to himself. They probably think he can last longer without it than most people can, probably. After all, nether creatures got most of the water they needed to live from the food they managed to scrounge up rather than eating it directly. Technoblade was adapted to the overworld at this point, though.

There’s a tenseness. A sinking feeling.

They’re on day three, Technoblade knows. If it had just been food, Technoblade wouldn’t be as worried. He could go longer without. He’d gone longer without. But it’s also the water. It’s the water.

He feels the strange numbing of regeneration and it hits him like a crossbow bolt.

“I didn’t know even Dream was  _ this _ cruel. Even I know the concept of mercy,” Technoblade says, and when Chat demands answers he doesn’t give any.

Finally, he says: “I’m gonna check the walls again, Chat, make sure I haven’t missed anything.”

It’s a tacit admission of defeat, in some ways. A tacit admission his old plan isn’t going to work. Was never going to work. But there must be some weakness to the system he can exploit, some way out he can take even without any items or real clues.

It only takes three days for a human to die without water. Pigs actually last less, only 24 hours before getting salt poisoning. Piglins have specialized ways to get water out of almost anything they eat and out of the rare pockets in the nether. They’re able to survive on small amounts of water compared to pigs, and can, according to some stories, go over two weeks without water, though after going that long without the amount they had to consume when they got it was  _ high _ . Technoblade isn’t fully adapted to that sort of life anymore, anyway, and was always more pig than piglin, and if there was one aspect of survival he’d never teetered on the edge of, it was  _ getting enough water to live _ , and… 

If you’re bothering to imprison someone, Techno had thought, you’d want to keep them alive. You wouldn’t just lock them away and then forget them. If you were doing that, it would be easier to just cut off their head and be done with it. You’d have to send someone by to make sure they stayed alive then, even if you were trying to intentionally weaken them. Nothing can survive without food and water. Everything will eventually die without food and water. Even plants need some kind of food and some kind of water -

But that, he realizes, is what the beacon’s for.

* * *

The problem with the prison being three by three is that it is far too easy to pace tight circles around it, even when everything is hurting in the background. Chat’s still asking on and off about what he’d said earlier, because they don’t let go of things sometimes and spam for hours. He almost wants to tell them to shut them up, but then they’re just gonna make fun of him for preparing the wrong plan for  _ two days. _ He’d never hear the end of it. His career would be absolutely ruined!

He’s confirmed about six more times that the prison has no weak spots he’ll be able to punch or charge through, especially not with the mining fatigue making every motion he makes feel like he’s making it through honey, or like he’s trying to make it while tied to resistance bands or something.

Still, there has to be something. Sam was a good builder, but the last build he’d seen, Sam had built with two doors broken. So the prison can’t be perfect.

“Chat, you all know things,” he says, just to see what will happen. “How about breaking obsidian under mining fatigue?”

_ two in-game days _

_ 45 minutes _

_ 50 _

_ 2 days _

_ day _

_ forty minutes _

_ 2 _

_ 45-ish _

“Chat, there’s a massive difference between forty-five minutes and two days. One of those things I can actually do, and one of those means I’ve gotta make a new plan. You have to be clear, Chat. You have to choose one or the other. Which is it?”

_ days _

_ it’s the days guys _

_ 45 _

_ for him its two days _

_ minutes _

_ guys in-game time remember _

_ 2 _

_ 47 minutes i just checked _

_ e _

_ 2 days _

_ TIME FOR HIM NOT US _

Techno breathes in through his nose and softly out of his mouth. That’s still incomprehensible, mostly, but judging from the shouting he’s gonna guess they mean a day and not forty-five minutes. “Yeah, I won’t be able to hold up my arms for that long,” he says. He’s pushed well through his limits before, but a day of continuously punching at hard obsidian will give him broken bones before he finishes cracking the glass enough to move through, let alone two. “And that’s just one layer, isn’t it? So that’s more like a week. Sure, chat, they won’t catch me trying to break out over two weeks.”

He hits his hand against the wall for emphasis. There’s still no bell-like ringing, and he still can’t feel anything like an imperfection.

_ imagine not being able to mine for two days straight _

_ e _

_ noob _

_ technonoob _

_ lame _

“Don’t make fun of me. It’s just not possible. It’s just not possible, guys.” He’s just gonna trust Chat for now. The voices sometimes get stuck on lying to him, but if he tries enough there’s normally  _ some _ semblance of clarity. They like being included, he’s noticed, so if he includes them, they give him better information. They like getting to shout things at him. Shame, then, that this is all information that he hadn’t wanted to hear.

He can’t find a fault line in the glassy obsidian so he’s gonna have to look into something else. Something else. What other options does he have? Maybe if he starts shouting loud enough the guards will hear him through the obsidian and let him out of their own volition. Ha. That’d be the day. 

He considers asking the voices again, but one useful conversation is… normally the limit for a day, honestly. Chat’s already dissolved into repeating the same things and arguing about whether it’s lame or not that he isn’t going to try to punch his hands bloody and make this all far worse for him. They’re screaming, slowly, shouting about how he should try, try it, Technoblade doesn’t give up, technolame, lame, try it, try it, and his head hurts worse now. Asking them was a mistake, actually, and he’s instantly regretting it. Why are the voices like this.

“ _ Please _ stop callin’ me lame,” he repeats. It doesn’t work. He groans. At least he can tell the voices off out loud here, because they’re being  _ irritating. _ “I’m not invulnerable, Chat. My fingers, believe it or not, still are made of skin and bone. Just—just break the obsidian? I should be built different? Chat. Chat. That’s not how this works. That’s just really not how this works!”

He starts pacing in circles again. His stomach hurts, and his head hurts, and Chat  _ won’t shut up _ , and there’s something sinking in his gut. He promised Philza he’d be home soon, so Phil should just get out as soon as Dream was busy getting Technoblade in the prison. He’d promised. He’s not gonna be made a liar. He doesn’t lie to Phil. Hide things, sure, though it’s not something he’s good at and Phil normally sniffs him out if he tries, but lie to him?

(That’s a lie. He’s disappointed his friend before, lied by accident, claimed he’d do things he never did, claimed to be better than he ever could be. He at least tries not to, with Phil, at least, because he wants to be better, he wants...)

The voices keep on calling for blood, too. And yeah, Dream’s blood would be nice, right now.

He feels tired and defeated again.

For yet another time, so many in he can’t count, he knocks on the walls again, patiently (or maybe desperately) waiting to hear a place where the obsidian will cleave.

* * *

The next time he wakes up, he already feels rather dizzy, and he sits and breathes for a while. Yeah, unsurprising. Even with the beacon, he’s going to get… weak. It’s enough to keep him alive. They wouldn’t be relying on it if it wasn’t enough to keep him alive. His new plan is simple: figure out  _ why _ they’re trying to keep him alive. Presumably, it’s for something he knows, or maybe as a threat to hang over the heads of everyone else, like he’s a beast they can keep in a labyrinth for when needed.

Joke’s on them; he’s a beast who reads Greek and Chinese philosophers. He doesn’t just attack because he can, he attacks because he knows the art and the feeling in his bones, and he knows what it means to  _ live. _ When the battle’s done, he’ll give his speech and retreat. He’s a  _ civilized _ monster.

Then again, he’ll get weaker every day he’s in here that they don’t bother to care for him with more than a glowing magic lightshow he can’t even see. He’s not much use as a monster, civilized or vicious either, when he gets dizzy if he stands too quickly. And that’s going to be the least of it, he knows. His head hurts, and his stomach hurts if he pays too much attention to it. So maybe it’s the civility after all. Like… Hannibal Lector, trapped in chains to consult and whisper sweet lies to those who get access to him. Except it’s him; he rarely says more than exactly what he means, and even when he is lying, he is rather obvious about it. Really, he’d be a safer consultant than Hannibal ever was.

Or maybe he’s conjuring reasons that the easy (and only, thus far) escape is what he’ll be able to take. The one where someone opens the door from the outside and he jumps them and runs into the night, with nothing but shaky nails and tusks to defend himself against the guards and prison defenses.

Calling it the easy plan is, perhaps, stretching it.

He’s dizzy, and he’s also bored. He’s not able to focus, not with the way half his body wants to focus right now on the fact that he’s dizzy, so he drops the planning again. For almost any plans except the “keep him alive to kill his enemies” one, Dream would need to wait until Techno is weaker still. Not too much weaker, not if he wants  _ coherency _ , but a bit weaker, at least.

He does his stretches again once the dizziness wears off. He asks the voices what time it is. He asks the voices—“You, you all like counting, don’t you? That’s one of your things. Can you keep count of how many days pass for me? My days, not whatever you all think a day is. The time it takes for the sun to go up and down again.” They agree. He doesn’t question how they’d know this when he doesn’t. (He doesn’t question how the voices know a lot of things, really.) “I’ll make things easy. Go ahead and start at 3.”

A thousand voices scream three at him and this is why he only talks to them when he doesn’t have anyone else to talk to.

“Guys, you absolutely do not have to keep shouting three. Chat. Chat. You aren’t helpful. I gave you that number because I already knew how many days it had been. Chat.” Nope, they’re still repeatedly shouting three at him. His head hurts worse now. It’s going to be at least twenty minutes before he hears anything but a hundred thousand voices shouting “3” in overlap, and he’d absolutely brought it on himself.

Well, at least they’re consistent. He’s still bored. He paces more wide circles around the tiny cell. He’s restless and sick and can’t make his thoughts turn over in his head correctly. He knows how to fight when he’s objectively weaker than his opponent. When he was younger, that’s all he’d done, fight as someone weaker than the people around him until he could be stronger, but thinking about it right now just brings attention to how dry his mouth is. He should stop walking in circles.

He gives up on planning again once he realizes he’s made the same plan for dealing with someone pearling in and out from above him where he can’t quite reach three times, dismissed it three times, and then done nothing to correct the mistakes he’d found. It’s too hard to focus already. It will get harder the longer he’s here, but he needs breaks. He needs simulation. He needs  _ something. _

“It’s storytime again, Chat,” he says, and he tells them the story of Medea, who left her home for love and destroyed the one who had betrayed her utterly. Jason was to blame for his fate in the end; he’d watched Medea kill her own family to follow him, and was surprised when she killed her own family to spite him. The story makes Technoblade’s mouth taste like blood and iron and gunpowder the longer he tells it, and he doesn’t think too hard about why.

* * *

The next day, he continues the routine, and tries not to feel himself burning more and more. He stretches. It’s harder that morning than the last, his muscles stiffer. He plans. How to take down a superior opponent: surprise them. He’ll need to somehow lure the guards into a sense of security. A plan for each way someone could come in. He stares at the walls.

He entertains himself by making faces in his reflection on the obsidian and puts up with it when the voices make fun of him.

He goes to sleep.

He wakes up. He continues the routine, and he tries to ignore the part of his brain that is now permanently screaming about food, and also the part of his brain that is the voices screaming their displeasure. He does his stretches. He considers the defenses of the prison. His spawn point is designed to shove him back in this box, so he’ll have to figure out how to bypass that if he can. Ideally, he just doesn’t die. In a non-ideal scenario, though, he figures out either how to switch his spawn or break his bed, either-or. Hey, he’s good at breaking beds, right?

He tells the story of Icarus and wonders if that’s a better name for Tommy, even if he doesn’t say it out loud.

He goes to sleep.

He wakes up. He continues the same thing because it gives him a sense of time. His leg suddenly spikes in pain when he tries to stretch it so he stops that stretch, another one to the pile that long-term mining fatigue is making hard on him. He switches it up, practices formal katas and fighting stances, even if he doesn’t have enough space and he has nothing heavy to hold, because at any moment he could have to seat a sword in his hands and swing it again, and it only takes a day or two to lose your muscle conditioning. Daily practice is something he’d had beaten into him long ago, and never stopped even once no one could hope to beat anything into him anymore.

His chat makes fun of him for looking stupid. He tells them that he’d rather look stupid than die.

He goes to sleep.

He wakes up and he stretches and he thinks of plans and he does something to attempt to keep his head in one piece when he’s a coiled boar who was never meant to be  _ still _ , when he’d always needed  _ space _ , when the voices grow more and more restless. They call for blood, or change, or anything.

They call for an escape and he has to tell them:  _ not yet. _

And then he goes to sleep.

* * *

_ PHIL PHIL PHIL _

_ PHILZA MINECRAFT _

_ ESCAPE _

_ KILLZA KILLZA _

_ OUT WITH A bANG _

“Excuse me?”

It has now been nine days and the soles of his feet are bleeding. He didn’t mean for them to start bleeding, but they have. The floor is smooth obsidian, certainly, but no one’s feet are really made to walk on hard, unforgiving glass in endless circles. He’d do something else if he had the choice. His elbows and hands hurt from where he’s balanced on them in an attempt to stretch and keep up some of his muscle tone. He’s been trying to plan for when someone will show up. He tries not to stand up too quickly. His brain keeps on going around to potatoes now, which is a bad sign on the food front, but the other thing his brain keeps on going around to is…

_ phil is COOL _

_ HE FLIES _

_ PHIL! PHIL! PHIL! _

“Why are you going on about Philza, Chat?” Has he been thinking about the man so much that the voices are starting to echo it back? If so, he’d like the voices to go back to ‘e’. please.

_ ESCAPED _

_ ANGEL OF DEATH _

_ cant hold him down _

_ ESCAPE _

_ GO _

_ PHILZA PHILZA PHILZA _

_ ESCAPE NOW _

Technoblade laughs, low and deep, and it echoes off of the obsidian walls around him. “They weren’t going to hold him for long,” he says. “There’s a reason his last name is Minecraft!” One of them is officially out, then, and it had to have been spectacular for Chat to be going off like it was. The voices are mostly incomprehensible, but they’re slowly growing into a swell. Escape now, they say. Escape now. There’s nothing holding him back anymore. 

That’s true. Philza’s apparently flying again—and Techno wonders how  _ that _ happened—and, from the sound of it, had escaped the place he’d been pinned down in L’Manburg. It sounded like there was probably a good amount of death and chaos involved. Techno hopes he finds Tommy next; the kid’s not going to stay hidden from Dream long without an actual adult around to help him.

He breathes in, he breathes out. One left, then. He kicks a wall. It doesn’t ring. One left to get out. Ghostbur is fine on his own, so one left to get out, and it’s the one of them that’s supposed to be  _ capable. _

And suddenly, Technoblade is furious. He’s frustrated and angry, and he hadn’t intended to stay trapped this long, and there’s no outlets anywhere for the man made of coiled energy, and Philza’s fine, Philza’s safe, and he’s stuck here. “I’ve bought him his time,” he says. “He’s safe. Now I just have to get out. Now I just have to get out of the unbreakable prison. Tell me Chat, have you ever heard of the Gordian Knot?”

_ CUT THE KNOT _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ ESCAPE _

_ KILLZA KILLZA _

_ ESCAPE _

He just has to find the way out that Sam didn’t think of. That’s all he has to do. He lets the fury and elation and relief run through his shaking chest and goes back to planning. He’s so dizzy. His feet are bleeding, and his brain keeps on trying to think about potatoes if he lets it wander too long, but if the voices are to be believed, Philza Minecraft  _ flew _ even though his wings had been clipped months ago. There’s a howl, a howl, a howl—he’s out, and Technoblade is in  _ here _ .

The voices howl in the back of his head and he wants to howl too and he laughs again, low and terrifying. Somewhere in him, a storm starts.

So he’ll fly too. It’s that easy. He just has to defy everything, the way that he and his friend always have. His hands shake. The walls don’t ring, but they must be weak.

The voices shout about Phil and escaping and about breaking glass and Technoblade screams with them and he plans and he spirals and they tell him to  _ break the walls _ and Phil’s escaped so now the only thing holding him in here is his own mistakes and it’s fury and glee and something like

_ blood for the blood god _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

He raises his hands and —

* * *

It’s day (he’s not sure) and he screams and breaks his knuckles on the wall, which doesn’t crack at all. He lashes out against it. He’s hungry and tired and dizzy and it’s been over a week at least and he just wants out, he just wants out and to talk to someone that isn’t the  _ howling  _ in his mind, they were useful, they were useful, but they don’t shut up and they don’t quiet, ever, and they’re screaming for his escape, they’re screaming for blood, they’re screaming that they’re bored, and he’s stupid enough to punch the wall where he thinks it should be weakest, over and over again.

It doesn’t work. He doesn’t want to wait. He’s hungry and dizzy and his mouth and throat are so dry that he wants to scream, and his limbs are heavy and shaking in a way he can barely recall in his life because he’s been in endless battles before but he’s never been under  _ mining fatigue _ for a full week, and there’s anger and restlessness under his skin. The storm howls and the voices howl with them.

He kicks the wall, too, for good measure, trying not to pay attention to his bruised and bloody fingers.

“It doesn’t work, Chat,” he says, hissing through his teeth. He’s not sure how long he’s been trying. “See? It doesn’t work. Be quiet, Chat. Stop talking. Stop suggesting this. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. I can’t just punch my way out of six layers of obsidian, not when they’ve apparently managed to cast it without major fault lines. I can’t.” They scream. He keeps going. He keeps trying. Two hundred thousand odd devils cheer him on.

(He might be fine in isolation, but he’s always done badly with nothing to do.)

The voices howl at him to keep going. Two days, they say. It’s only two days. They’ll sit through it. It’s boring, but they won’t leave. Just keep going. 

_ keep trying _

_ ESCAPE _

_ LAME _

_ technolame _

_ GIVING UP _

_ go  _

_ keep going _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

He hits the wall again and ignores the fact that with each swing his arm feels more and more like he can’t move it for the next one. Fine. He’ll keep going. If no one’s going to come by, he’ll keep going. He’ll do the impossible again.  _ Technoblade never dies. _

And the voices egg him on and his hands bleed and bleed until he can’t keep punching with them even if he tries and the obsidian doesn’t even have the honor to be cracked.

Technoblade doesn’t give up on things. The voices are mocking him for the fact he can’t keep on swinging his hands, but he’s not giving up. His mind is mercy to the whims of thousands as he beats against an unbreakable wall and  _ nothing breaks _ . Nothing even makes a sound. When he stops moving, he doesn’t make any human sound. He just roars. It’s angry, and it bounces off the walls the way his laugh for Phil did, and no one comes. He roars and he sits down and he does not stand up. He hasn’t given up.

The storm howls and howls and howls and—

The pain breaks through, his skin breaks.

He gives up.

He drags himself out of the hazy feedback loop of the voices feeling and Techno feeding off of that and the voices feeding off of him again.

He patches up his hands the best he can without any real supplies, tearing his shirt so he can get  _ something  _ to hold the fingers in place. They’re broken in one or two places where he’d hit too hard and he’d ignored it.

He’d managed to lose himself with bloodlust when there was nothing to kill and nothing to do but hurt himself. Fantastic! This was ideal! Nothing wrong with  _ that _ at all. He even got new information for his plan: hurting himself wasn’t enough to draw the guards to him. He hadn’t planned on pulling that gambit yet, but now that he has, well. That’s another plan out the window! And another sign they really plan on leaving him to rot.

His fingers are going to heal wrong. He’ll have to rebreak them once he’s out, and even then, his sword hand isn’t going to work quite as well ever again. He’s suffered worse injuries though, and recovered his style from worse. After years of fighting, he’s layers and layers of places that never healed correctly, He’ll adjust.

He turns to the wall and falls asleep and tries not to think about much of anything for a while.

* * *

Here is something that is true about Technoblade: the devil makes work for idle hands, and there’s always been a devil in him. Technoblade is never idle. His hands are broken and bloody and he tries to do his morning stretches anyway. The cell is too small for a man of his size but he tries to at least pace around it anyway. There’s nothing to do, so he will make things, and if he can’t make things, the devil will.

The devil is two-hundred thousand voices in an eerie chorus, shouting things that only he can hear.

Here is something else that is true about Technoblade: he’ll go crazy in a three by three box far faster than he ever would in exile. He’s not like Tommy. It’s not the isolation that does it. There could be people who visited daily, and he’d still go crazy in a three by three box. It’s not even the monotony, because Technoblade can do monotony, he can lose himself to the same so long as he’s doing something. 

The devil makes work for his hands, but he doesn’t know how to stand down when there’s no more work to do.

Here is something that is true about Technoblade: there is still work to be done. It’s just locked away where he can’t get to it, and that’s worse.

It is at this point, ten, or maybe twelve? Or was it eleven—some number of days in, the voices already lost count, the idiots. It’s at this point that Techno confronts the final possibility for why they wanted to capture him instead of kill him, and it’s simple in its cruelty: they wanted to make it  _ hurt. _

When he died, they wanted to make it as utter and complete as possible. 

He does not tell this to the voices yet. 

Here is something that is true about Technoblade: he never dies. There’s more than one way to kill a person, though, and the air never has to finish leaving their lungs. He never dies, though. He’ll never die. So he doesn’t need to tell anyone what he realizes is true about Technoblade yet. He doesn’t need to say anything. He’ll still get out, as soon as the self-inflicted wounds on his hands heal.

(And if he doesn’t. Well. When he tells them, they’ll know, because he’ll have given up, and he’ll have died already.)

He doesn’t know how many days it’s been anymore, not when he’s never slept on a normal schedule before and he can’t see the sun, the light overhead always the same flickering yellow, no outward signs of time passing. He won’t for a while. He doesn’t bother asking again.

(And something changes, after he realizes all of this.)

* * *

The frustrating thing is that he’s deteriorating too quickly. Part of it, he acknowledges, is that this is really, really not built for him (built exactly to the specifications he’d hate most). Part of it, he knows, is that the mining fatigue takes up part of his brain at any moment, and he  _ knows _ hunger takes up an irrational part of your brain the moment you start to starve, that’s how any animal in the world works. Part of it is certainly the fact that while regeneration will keep him alive, it won’t make him less tired, and there’s only but so much damage it can undo in a day. Part of it is the severe ADHD, he’s not gonna lie. There’s also the voices in his head, the general bloodlust, his frustration at being here at all, his  _ mild _ anger at the situation.

Part of it is on him: the mistake of forgetting Chat wasn’t exactly  _ benign. _

And a weakness of regeneration is that it can only heal but so much at once.

His hand is healing  _ slowly _ and the hunger and thirst and bone-deep ache is worse every minute. He  _ hurts _ , and is  _ exhausted _ , and it’s probably his fault for letting chat get him worked up because they were worked up. The voices are quiet now, at least. They’ve realized how badly they screwed up. Maybe. For as much as they called for blood and destruction, they were also idiots who barely thought a thing about what they said or did. They’d forget soon enough and he’d bleed for them again. That’s how it had always worked. He’d try to ignore them until he didn’t have a choice but to try to sate them. It’s harder to ignore them when there’s nothing to distract from them or to distract them with.

But they’re relatively quiet, right now. They’re just… counting. He almost likes the counting. It’s something like calming. Something to focus on instead of the fact that everything hurts.

He stares at the wall for a moment before sighing and starting to count too. Naturally, this causes the voices to instantly devolve into pure nonsense. He sighs. Starts over from one. He’s deteriorating too quickly. Slower than he would have without the beacon, but now that his shirt’s torn up, when he looks across at the reflective glass, he’s pretty sure he can start to count ribs. Given that, at one point, he’d had  _ muscle tone _ and a healthy amount of body mass for a piglin, that wasn’t… good.

He keeps counting with the voices. He can’t forget they aren’t benign. (He can’t forget they aren’t evil, either. Not when he’s otherwise alone.)

He winces when he knocks a finger funny. He hadn’t realized he’d moved to tap them on instinct. He rides out the sharp pain of his cracked bone remembering it’s cracked and doesn’t count his ribs but instead counts whatever nebulous thing Chat is counting. He’s pretty sure they’re just counting for counting’s sake, honestly. He likes it better than e. Maybe he can train them into doing it more often; he successfully trained them into saying “tubbo is gone” every time his death came across the communicator. It proved the voices were trainable, at least.

He stops counting. “Maybe that should be my new project. That and conservin’ energy.” He’d deteriorating too quickly, he thinks, to do much else. He’ll keep trying to stay on his routine and trying not to let himself get back too attached to the voices again and patch himself up and try not to hurt himself. The voices are asking what the project is. He’s not telling them. It’s something to do.

The more he has to do, the longer he can stave off the deterioration.

* * *

He wakes up. 

He stands up to stretch.

He wakes up on the ground and his head hurts and his vision is grey and he can’t see straight and he realizes he’s hit the breaking point. He’s hit a breaking point and now everything isn’t just sore but bruised too and his head feels like it’s been shoved through a blender and he wants to throw up and maybe scratch his throat out and the voices are all shouting grey mush at him.

“Shut up,” he tells the voices. His voice cracks. Just after he’d resolved to stop deteriorating, too. “Just… shut up.”

_ technosupport _

_ ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ _

_ technosupport _

_ TECHNOSUPPORT _

_ ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ _

“That’s not shutting up, Chat,” he says, and he laughs. It hurts his throat.

He’s the ground, barely able to see straight, probably concussed because fainting on obsidian isn’t a gentle landing, and he’s laughing. He reaches his hands up to his head and doesn’t take away blood, at least, and everything hurts and he’s been stabbed and cut up before and in theory that hurts worse but it’s just that it’s everything, everything all at once. He won’t get better from here, either. Before, well, he’d been trained long ago into ignoring the things that hurt, but he can’t anymore now that his body is collapsing beneath him.

His laugh is a little dark, a little cracked. “I’d hoped I’d last a  _ little _ longer. A  _ little _ longer before I totally cracked. Alas, Chat, our little incident with my hands probably made this faster.” He ignores the fact that anyone else would have collapsed far sooner. There’s a beacon to heal him, even if it doesn’t stop his slow deterioration. He should be able to stand longer than this.

He keeps on staring at the ceiling and saying: “This is what I get for dealing with devils. Chat, stop being supportive, I’m talking about you too. Don’t deny it. I’m definitely not just talking about Dream, Chat. No, stop being supportive, I’m making fun of you!” He lies against the hard ground and doesn’t know how long it’s been and keeps lying there for a while. Eventually, he props himself up, and he finally starts planning again. He needs plans that don’t assume he’ll be strong.

He needs plans that assume he won’t be lucid.

He needs plans that assume he isn’t getting—

No. Not yet.  _ Not yet. _

* * *

And he gets bored, still, even when there are times he falls asleep, opens his eyes, and finds himself too dizzy to see in a straight line or too light-headed to be awake or hurting too badly to really move. 

All of those things start happening, and they’re all the worst, by the way. Sometimes they all happen at once. Now that he’s fainted once, it’s like every signal his body had been giving and he’d been resolutely ignoring would now scream at him, hurting him as he breathed. His throat hurts, and everything feels dry and empty. Moving too much feels like tearing something. He’s dizzy and feels like his head has been shoved in a vice. He’s constantly exhausted, fighting between falling asleep every minute of the day and being unable to sleep as he doubles over every time he moves his head wrong. Oh, and there are the mishealing broken fingers. Can’t forget those. He’s falling apart too fast. He’s falling apart too fast now that he’s started and he’s spiraling, spiraling—

—but worse, you know, is that he’s bored. Because if it wasn’t enough to know that his body is eating through his muscle tone and that he’s starved to dehydrated to the very brink of death, he’s still a tiger with no stimulation in his cage. Don’t tigers start biting themselves in this situation? Isn’t that why they give the zoo animals toys and branches to play with? So they don’t hurt themselves?

He tries asking Chat this and the voices  _ hate it _ . He doesn’t ask again. He does point out, vicious and hurting, that the one time he’s hurt himself so far was their fault. They still repeatedly tell him not to hurt himself. (He slips once, not from bloodlust but from boredom, pressing his nails too hard into his skin and realizing it’s  _ new _ , it’s something he hasn’t  _ tried _ , and the voices  _ hate that,  _ hate that worse than the nothing he’d been doing before or being ignored or Philza and Tommy getting hurt. He hasn’t been so happy to suddenly find himself obeying the voices as when he shakes himself out of it to realize on a level beyond intellectual that clawing himself because it’s a new sensation is  _ a bad idea _ .)

His solution is a messy one but now that he can’t make up new stretches, it’s the easiest one:

“Chat, storytime again. What do you all want to hear about?”

The voices all clamor at once, but one normally rises above the rest. Some of the stories he tells are myths, but he’s pretty much out of those. Chat has other stories they want, anyway, and Technoblade finds himself talking about his childhood—

“I was fightin’ since I was little. My parents were murdered and all. The guys who trained me weren’t real nice about it, but they paid later. ‘Sides, I learned some important things, like keepin’ up my physical trainin’, or stabbin’ things. Made me real good at competitions. You like tournaments, so cuttin’ my teeth on the kind I couldn’t opt out of was good for me once you started talkin’, Chat. Wouldn’t have been nearly as good on Mondays if I had a way of optin’ out when I was a kid.”

He’s asked about Philza and—

“He was mad at me when he realized I was Will’s age. Said somethin’ about wanting to have known his partner in war was his kid’s age. Didn’t stop him from stayin’ my best friend or anything, though, it was too late for that. He did make me sign papers so he’d get news on me if I ended up in medical on Hypixel or somethin’, though. Haah. People called him the right hand of the Emperor, but some days I figure I was the right hand of the Angel of Death.”

The number of people who ask him about Wilbur after that is a lot—

“We met before I met Phil, actually. Wilbur’s the one who found me, more like. I was covered in blood on the Mondays and he just decided he’d like me for some reason. He was loud. He was the kinda guy who could even make me feel comfortable in a crowd, could probably make anyone feel comfortable in a crowd by takin’ up all the attention you didn’t want. I laughed at him when I found out he was Phil’s kid, but it backfired because he decided that made us  _ basically twins  _ to use those words. Ghostbur does that too sometimes. Of  _ course _ the things Ghostbur remembers has to include all the things that were irritatin’ for me. Makes me miss Will.”

They ask about Tommy, too, because Philza and Tommy are Chat’s favorites, for some reason, and now that Technoblade will talk about himself and other people when he’s awake they may as well—

“Tommy’s an annoyance. He doesn’t give up. Didn’t give up until he’d somehow made me care, either, the idiot. One time he and Will got in a fight and made me mediate it. I just told ‘em to punch it out, though. I can speak with words, Chat! Shut up, you know I can be eloquent. But I’m not gonna step between  _ Wilbur _ and  _ Tommy _ in an argument, especially not over… what were they even fightin’ about then, somethin’ dumb Wilbur had said, probably, that Tommy’s insulted. At least the kid finishes fights he starts. It’s the nice thing about him. Even after whatever Dream did to ‘em, he still finishes what he starts.”

He hurts his throat talking like this, but it’s something to do. It hurts his head and his heart. He doesn’t say he misses them. He gets called  _ technosoft _ anyway and he’s pretty sure the voices know. Besides, it isn’t all soft stories. Some of the stories he tells are more…

“I just remembered they called this place Pandora’s Vault. Do you think that makes me the hope at the bottom? I don’t think so. I think that makes me the vice of wrath, personally. And with a name like that, they’re going to open it eventually. Once I’m at full strength, what weapons should wrath use to kill them? I’m feeling the fireworks again. Messy, but colorful! And impactful, even in netherite.” 

“Dream? Chat, Chat, do we really want to talk about  _ Dream _ ? I did warn him I believe in absolute reciprocity. I told everyone I’d hurt those who hurt my friends tenfold. Chat, I’ve beat him before. Sure, this time he may have access to  _ god-like powers _ , but Chat, I have access to me! And about fifty-six withers. Plus, the man is cocky! You know what they say about heroes and hubris.”

“...it was a mistake to deal with Dream, but I didn’t really have a choice. I mean, I  _ had _ a choice with the maps, but it would have been rude to refuse them, and I think I got a totem extra anyway. He’s the one who cheated, really. He was vague with his favor. Should have known better. That didn’t mean he could just… grab Phil when I took the opportunity to get around killin’ Tommy. That wasn’t fair of him. That wasn’t  _ sportin’ _ . Imagine if I’d gone and grabbed George! Then again, hasn’t Dream been talkin’ like he doesn’t have friends anymore, lately? Maybe he just doesn’t understand why you don’t go makin’ a hostage out of Philza Minecraft anymore. Makin’ a hostage out of any of us. Chat, we’re probably the bad guys, but at least we’re bad guys with  _ some _ kind of heart. What do you think Dream’s got in there?”

Sometimes the stories aren’t things he meant to say out loud at all.

“I’m real tired, Chat.”

“I’m pretty sure I can count all my bones now. Some bones, some of them you’re meant to see. Not all of them, though. That’s bad, everyone. I’m tired.”

“I made a mistake.”

“Havin’ trouble lifting my arm today.”

“Pretty sure my thumb’s not meant to be at that angle, everyone.”

“I’m… real hungry, Chat.”

Most of the time, he’s not quite coherent enough to care that he’s saying things he shouldn’t, though. At least it’s something new for him to do, a story he hasn’t told yet. At least someone knows what’s happening to him, even if it isn’t who he’d want to. In another life, maybe he would have told stories for a living. That’d have been nice. “If I’d told stories instead’a killin’ people, maybe you all would have left me alone,” he says, but even as he says it he doubts it.

He’s awake less and less as the days pass by.

* * *

He wakes up to a strange  _ thump _ and would scramble to his feet if it wouldn’t knock him out. Instead, he looks up and.

_ Ah. _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ DRE _

_ BLOOD _

_ HES HERE _

“Hello, Technoblade.”

“Hello, Dream. Here to let me out?”

“Hahaha. No, no. Not after the effort it took to get you in here.”

_ KILL HIM _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ DREAM _

_ KILL _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

“Well, it was worth askin’.”

“Sure, sure. I’m actually here to ask you a few questions. You’re surprisingly witty for someone who’s been here for a bit over a month. I’m impressed.”

“Haah?”

“Did you not know?”

“It’s hard to count, Dream, there isn’t a clock or windows.”

“True, true.”

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ DRE _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

“Anyway, before I interrogate you, I thought I’d tell you I brought a bottle of water for if you’re good. I thought about food but I don’t think you’d do well with anything solid.”

“That’s pretty low, tauntin’ a starvin’ man.”

“Hey, it works. I’m sure  _ you _ understand the tactics. Now, do you know where your friends could have gone?”

“You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

_ KILL HIM _

_ HOW DARE HE _

_ KILL _

_ GREEN BITCH _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

“You know who I’m talking about.”

“And I don’t know where they are. Funny, that. Phil’s not shown me all his secret bases for exactly somethin’ like this.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well, I’m not lyin’.”

_ DADZA _

_ KILL HIM _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ MAKE HIM PAY _

“Hey, you okay, Techno?”

“Yeah, it’s—hard not to get a cough when your throat’s this dry.”

“You could just tell me…”

“Can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ HE DESERVES DEATH _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

“You’re way too coherent for someone who’s been isolated for this long. Almost like you're talking to someone. Sure, I took a bit more time with Tommy, but—“

“Don’t talk about Tommy.”

“Touchy, touchy. Anyway, you should be begging. You really are impressive. Or maybe stupid. You still think you can come out on top, don’t you? You sure talk like it.”

“Nah. I’m just petty enough not to let you win.”

“You’ll bend eventually. Well, I know a lost cause when I see one. See you in, oh, another month then?”

“Yeah, sure. See you. Not like I have a choice.”

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ HES STREAM SNIPING _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD _

_ BLOOD FOR THE _

As Dream lifts a trident to leave, Techno  _ lunges _ , in solidarity with the every fiber of his entire being that screams for  _ revenge _ and the voices that scream for blood; he hasn’t filed his tusks in so long that they’re too long and sharp and Technoblade  _ bites _ and  _ tears _ and  _ claws _ and he tastes  _ blood _ and  _ victory _ and -

He wakes up on the ground and his head is bleeding.

“That was pretty stupid,” Dream says. “Maybe I won’t come back after all.”

And he leaves Technoblade there, bleeding, while the voices keep screaming, and he closes the entrance he’d made behind him, and whatever light it had let in was gone, and his head hurt, and it was good there was nothing in his stomach to throw up from one perspective, and he peels himself off the ground but can’t quite actually do it, and he realizes that was his last chance.

That was his only chance and he  _ couldn’t do it _ .

He couldn’t do it.

* * *

This is what he tells Chat:

“Dream knows somethin’ a lot of people don’t, but I know. I know ‘cause I was born in blood. It’s somethin’ like this: it’s not really three lives, not exactly. Everyone knows it’s three rough respawns, not three lives of any kind. What were they callin’ it? ‘Canon’ deaths?” 

The voices are shouting. They’re reminding him that he has three lives left, that he hasn’t lost a single life. It’s funny. It’s funny.

“The truth is that by tellin’ people they’ve got three lives, you’ve given them a limit and a chance, right? No one’s gonna believe they’ve got infinite deaths that hurt, but three… they’ll  _ buy _ three. The truth is that you die when you think you have. When after dyin’, there’s no more comin’ back as the person you were. When you’re good and ready for it. That’s the secret. There’s an art to killin’ people so they don’t come back, Chat, and the secret is that by the time you can, you’ve already done it. You’ve already changed them so they can’t change back. That’s what kills you, no matter how many ‘canon’ lives you’ve got left. You just fit it back in retrospect.”

The voices are still screaming at him. They’ve figured out what he’s saying. He lies back against the obsidian and says:

“Dream was awful careful not to actually kill me just then. I never learned it really, Chat. I have some mercy left in me. Better to make it clean, even if they’ll respawn later. But he doesn’t care, does he? I have some mercy left in me. He was too careful not to kill me. He knew. He  _ knew. _ Better to make it clean in my book, but he knows.”

There’s so much screaming and none of it means anything.

“That was my last chance. My only chance, really. I’m only gonna get worse from here. I’m real tired.”

And they tell him:  _ Technoblade never dies. _

He digs his nails into his arms and watches them bleed and he says: “Guys, I think he already has.”

(He cries for the first time in a long time. When he stops crying, the voices are counting, and he counts with them for a long time after that, too.)

* * *

He’s not awake much after that. Maybe his body finally feels him stop  _ fighting _ to be awake, and there’s not much to do at that point but conserve what energy he has. It’s easier than being awake, anyway. When he is awake, he’s not entirely sure he is. His ability to be at all coherent is going downhill fast, from there. He’ll be awake but barely able to do more than whimper in silence, or he’ll be awake but so certain he’s dying that he can’t bring himself to speak through it. He lives, though. He falls back asleep and then wakes up again later and sometimes even wakes up coherent enough to consider himself  _ awake _ .

He slips up and tells the voices that he’s beginning to wish he wouldn’t and he didn’t know the voices could do  _ concern _ until all of this had started.

He’s just exhausted, and hungry, and hurting, and he’s unfortunately the sort of person who knows when he’s been beaten, so. He doesn’t normally accept it until there’s no other choice, and he normally has a plan for defeat, but this is a defeat of… everything. A defeat of his entirety. Of course he’s tired, even if he’s almost… ashamed.

He owes an apology to Tommy, he thinks, even if it’s really not the isolation that’s killing him, because he at least understands a bit better what Tommy was feeling then, now. He owes apologies to a lot of people, honestly, but it’s only Tommy, Philza, and Wilbur that he’d bother with, in some world where he gets to tell the apologies to them. He sits there and imagines just getting to  _ see _ them, and saying sorry, or at least saying something near to it. He’s not good at apologizing.

Chat starts trying (badly) to tell him what’s going on outside. They talk about TNT cannons and flying machines and  _ just a little longer _ , they talk about Philza and Tommy and Wilbur, they talk about a collapsing small country and a desperate Dream, and it all feels like an impossible fever dream, far away from here. Techno isn’t sure if they’re lying. They’ve liked to lie a lot in the past. They made him excited about Philza as an excuse to get him to hurt himself in the past. He tells them this. They keep on telling him.

He’s run out of stories he wants to tell himself, but whatever filter he’s had before is gone, and when his throat works properly he finds himself talking anyway. The talking is choppy. He stops mid-statement, sometimes, and uses as few words as he can, but he thinks he repeats himself more than he should, too.

Chat goes back to trying to tell him how long it’s been, now that Dream’s given them a new reference point, but he doesn’t really want to know, and it’s not like days actually mean anything to him anyway.

And he falls asleep and he wakes up screaming and he falls asleep and he wakes up without being awake and he falls asleep and he falls asleep and he’s never sure if he’ll wake up again but he does and he does and he does and he does and  _ Technoblade never dies _ keeps on repeating every time he does and it was supposed to be a mantra but now it’s a curse and he wakes up and he wakes up and he wakes up and he

everything blends together

when he wakes up Chat keeps on counting and that’s when Technoblade knows he’s lost it, because they’ve never bothered being  _ nice _ for this long before.

Counting’s easy, though. He doesn’t need full sentences to count. He’s not doing great at stringing those together anymore.

He’s not sure time is real.

He isn’t bored anymore, at least, because he’s not awake enough to be. It’s not a lining to anything, silver or otherwise. It just is.

He just is.

He just is, on and on and on and on.

(And the voices say:  _ hang on a little longer _ . But it’s not like he has a choice either way.)

* * *

He hates the temperature sometimes when he’s lucid. He misses the cold. Cold hurt him in a way no other environment did. The sting reminded him he was alive. Another challenge. Proof he was standing there. He misses the cold. He misses home.

* * *

He wishes he had said something to Dream for the water. It probably wouldn’t have helped in the long term but he’s thirsty.

* * *

For a single moment he wishes he’d traded Philza instead, but even in that moment, he recoils. No, he couldn’t have done that. He couldn’t have. He couldn’t have. He couldn’t have. He couldn’t have. He can’t think that. Why would he think that. He can’t think that. He can’t.

There are bloody lines across his arms when he stops panicking later and blood under his nails. He just keeps on thinking that’s the one thing this isn’t allowed to break. He can lose everything else but he can’t give up Philza he can’t he can’t _he can’t he can’t he can’t_ —

* * *

He wakes up and Wilbur is disappointed in him, and it hurts worse than anything. It’s not real. It’s the realest thing here. It’s something in-between. He's disappointed, too.

* * *

He’s furious, actually. Why? What  _ is this? _ He was raised on war and  _ torture doesn’t actually work _ and  _ he may be a monster but he’d learned mercy once _ and they’re standing there laughing at him because he can’t fight anymore and that’s the only thing a blade is built to do, that’s the only thing he’s built for. How dare they force him blunt when being sharp was all he was built for!

* * *

He’s… he’s so tired why is he  _ awake _ everything  _ hurts _ why is he  _ awake _ —

* * *

_ 135 _

_ 134 _

_ 136 _

_ 135 _

_ 136 _

_ 137 _

_ 137 _

“One… one hundred-thirty eight.”

_ YES _

_ 138 _

_ 134 _

_ 139 _

_ 138 _

_ 133 _

_ idiots lagging _

_ 140 _

* * *

He’s going to kill everyone, he thinks. Everyone. He’s never going to see the sky again, but anyone who dares to come near him, he’ll kill or they’ll kill him for good. Either way, it will be going down in blood, and that's all that's fitting for him.

* * *

He doesn’t think about anything.

* * *

There’s nothing.

* * *

There’s nothing.

* * *

_ just a few more days _

_ TECHNOSUPPORT _

_ theyre almost here _

_ TECHNOSUPPORT _

“Chat, s- stop ly…”

He can’t quite finish the words.

* * *

And for a long time, even when he’s awake, he sleeps, and that’s fine with him. That’s fine. There’s nothing else left for him to do, anyway. He just sleeps. When he’s awake, he drifts, and when he’s not awake, that’s less time to drift and hurt and wonder what’s happened to Technoblade.

Technoblade wouldn’t have stopped making plans to escape so long ago, and wouldn’t be dying but for cruel magic inflicted on the prison. He doesn’t want to wonder what happened to him. That’s when he keeps on imagining Wilbur or Philza disappointed in him and knows it’s true.

* * *

There’s nothing.

* * *

Chat’s unusually loud and he wants to tell them to be quiet but that’s an argument and a half, even if the voices have been strangely indulgent lately. Instead, he listens to them shouting. There’s a lot of incoherent  _ dadza _ and  _ tommy _ and  _ its time _ and  _ hang on _ and  _ its time _ and there’s an increasing chant of blood, blood, blood for the blood god, and he has no idea why. There isn’t blood here, or anyone to take blood for. That isn’t stopping them from going  _ absolutely feral _ on the cries for blood.

He hears… withers. And explosions? He feels the sense every player gets for one, two, five withers, and that… can’t be right but he hasn’t hallucinated withers yet. He hears screaming and something familiar and then the sky opens up and Phil flies down, and, oh. Weird… weird dream. Weird hallucination. Withers scream in the background.

“What have they done to you, mate,” he hears Phil say, softly. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.” Technoblade blinks back at him. 

“Chat, this is… a weird…”

Chat’s cheering for Dadza. Philza picks him up, the expression on his face dark as he does it easily.

“Come on, Techno. I’m so sorry I took so long. We’re getting you out of here. No one will  _ ever _ come back here. We’re making sure of that.”

“Okay,” says Technoblade, because he knows better than to deny Philza when he’s like this, even if it’s a fake Philza. Wings flap, and suddenly, Technoblade sees stars, and the faint blue glow of Ghostbur’s sweater, and withers and fighting and Tommy wearing his stupid Christmas present, and this is… this is a good dream. This one’s a really good dream. If it’s not a dream, he’d prefer Chat  _ not _ wake him up, to keep pretending for a little while longer, okay? Because normally they’d gotten to the part where either Phil and Wil and Tommy are all hurt or all disappointed or all betrayed by now.

(Through a haze, he hears Philza make a frustrated, angry, and devastated sound, as though Techno had said some of that out loud.)

“Let’s go, boys,” says Phil. “We’ve got him. You all have your splash potions ready, yeah? He’s even worse than we thought. Probably needs regen safely get home.”

“Holy shit,” Tommy says. “Is that blood in his hair? Why is there — _ fuck _ , man, he’s not supposed to be this small—”

“Family reunion!” Ghostbur says, explosions dancing in his eyes.

“Let’s go,” Philza says, and Technoblade looks back and the prison is being torn apart by ten withers that no one was prepared to try to fight all at once, and there’s blood gleaming across the obsidian.

_ ITS OVER _

_ its over _

_ HE MADE IT _

_ DADZA _

_ THEY GOT HIM _

_ TECHNOSUPPORT _

_ TECHNOBLADE NEVER DIES _

“Sorry,” Techno says, trying to convey it as seriously as possible.

“Don’t worry,” says Philza, and then they fly, and the beacon’s light gets further and further away, and he feels a potion break on his head, and then he falls asleep again, and it’s a good dream, for once. It’s a good dream.

He hopes he doesn’t wake up too soon.

* * *

He wakes up, and the ceiling is lit with blue torches, and he’s surrounded by cold white and blue carpet, and he’s on an actual bed. His communicator, or at least a communicator, is sitting next to his bedside, glowing lightly. Tommy is asleep in a chair in the corner. Ghostbur is playing guitar. Philza runs a hand over his head.

“Go back to sleep,” Philza says. 

“Huh,” Techno says. “I told you not to come for me.”

“I took too long,” Phil says.

“Nah,” says Techno. 

“You should have just let him stab me,” Phil says.

“For you, the world, Phil.” He tries to smile.

“...shit, mate,” Philza says. “Shit.”

They sit in the quiet for a while, although it’s not as quiet as his cell. The torches make noise that redstone doesn’t. Technoblade realizes he has an IV in. Huh. Unsurprising, since regen keeps you alive, not rehabilitates, but… he hasn’t had to be on one of  _ those _ in a long time. Tommy stirs in his chair. Ghostbur keeps on playing guitar. It’s not quiet, he realizes, and it’s been a long time since anything but the voices made noise.

“Go back to sleep,” says Phil. “We’ll still be here in the morning.”

“Chat, how long has it been?” he asks, suddenly. He wants to know.

They tell him it’s been around two months while Phil sits there and checks his IV and watches his bed. Techno nods. 

“WHAT THE FUCK, PHIL! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO  _ TELL ME _ WHEN HE WOKE UP!”

“He’s not supposed to be awake. He’s supposed to be sedated. I was _ going to tell you _ , but only when he’s ready.”

“Well he’s awake now!”

“Not for  _ long. _ ”

“Loud,” mutters Techno.

“Sorry,” Tommy and Phil say at once, and Ghostbur aggressively plays the guitar louder, like he’s trying to block out the argument.

Technoblade  _ laughs,  _ and laughs, and it hurts his throat but it’s a happy, desperate kind of hurt. When he can talk again, there’s a lot to say, and nothing at all. When he can talk again, he’ll have to confront his wasted away limbs and the fact he’s barely stood for a month and the fact his head feels like cotton and hurt and the fact that he still feels raw and like he’ll break the moment he talks too long and the way he still knows bone-deep that the moment he dies he’s gone for good. He’ll have to explain to Tommy why he was dealing with Dream, he’ll have to hide, he’ll have to probably explain Chat to Tommy and Wilbur properly, along with anyone else who helps them, given that he’s not sure he knows how to not talk out loud to them anymore. He’ll have to admit where his wounds came from. He’ll have to admit he’s failed. He’ll have to say he isn’t okay.

But for now, he’s made it through. For now, he’s going to be okay, just a little longer.

He hears numbers and cheers and cries for revenge in the back of his mind, guitar and arguing in the front, the communicator pinging with global chat messages and the crackling of a torch in the room, and all the noise and the white walls and the shifting shadows lull him to sleep once more.

**Author's Note:**

> when i started writing this, the most popular working theory was that the prison was for techno, and i wanted to write something for it. in the time it took for me to write it that’s become far more unlikely, but that’s not gonna stop me from writing my whump fic, just like techno being very sus towards tommy won’t stop me from writing sleepy bois. it’s my unnecessarily long oneshot and I can decide to preemptively declare this an au so when the prison is used in a few days here this fic is still valid if i want to.
> 
> as someone who has severe adhd, a uniform tiny box with no simulation sounds like the most effective way in the world to torture me.
> 
> this is in a series because i'm probably not done with this universe because i do like me some comfort with my hurt on occasion


End file.
